Teaser, Trailer, Tinker, Tailor!

Watch the teaser for Dogfist on Vimeo.

http://www.vimeo.com/6446839

Stop Frame River

This animation is a dry run for a much larger
stop motion sequence in the film. It was made
with 294 photos, and I also used After Effects
to control the look of the final video.

Initially, the factor I was most concerned about
was flicker. The subtle variations in lighting that
become very noticeable when the photos are
linked together in a sequence. There is a flicker
removal option in most video editing software,
but this is only a partial fix, and it loses some of
the charm that comes with stop frame.

Becase I was using a digital camera to give the
highest possible picture quality (with higher
resolution you have more freedom to zoom into
the animation), I wasn't able to use any software
to help make the process easier (look up 'onion
skinning'). I did, however, find that using the
remote control speeded up the process a lot.

Other important lessons; always take a back-
up memory card or two , because you're going
to take a lot of pictures. It's more efficient if
you have a coupole of friends doing different
jobs (even if Tristan only picks up one or two
sticks, it's still better to have him on board)

The boat needs a lot of work to give it that
floating movement, authentic movements is
something I will work on next time around...

Unfinished Matt

Never got the chance to quite finish this one, and the longer I left it the more convinced I was it would never be finished. I think the lesson here is that procrastination is akin to stagnation and wow I've got to take this a bit less seriously.

What we have here is the captain holding a beastie hand-gun.

The gun is my own design but based on some state of the art weaponry I found on the internet. I had this crazy idea that (plagarists, help yourself to this one) the captain's gun would have motion sensors that are sensitive to the movement of the hand and wrist, meaning that if the gun is shot in a particular style you could hypothetically put spin/curve on the bulley allowing the owner to shooting round corners or altering the direction of the missile.

Showdown at Camacho's 2

Another experimentation for the graphic novel but I think it turned out to dark.

Concept Art

Dave Bowcutt ©

An impressive bit of sketchwork from DBO, which captures the frankenstien's monster approach to ship building that we are looking for. In Dave's own words 'Will it fly?'

Practice/Work Dodging

Jamie Wilson ©

One might say that this is not really related to the graphic novel at all, but I was so pleased with the results that I'm posting it anyway.

Perhaps someone can come up with some tenuous back story so that we can incorporate this character!!
This guy had a very hairy chest, but I'll be damned if I'm going to sit here drawing the short and curlies. It took about 2 hours in all, which is good going if you ask me.

For the hat and shirt I saved time by using the pen tool over the pencil tool - this meant that I could draw long straight lines and still describe curves, and unlike the pencil tool had more chance of keeping within the black lines. I just used two skin tones, not wanting to make things more detailed than they need to be (I actually drew an oval and adjusted the shape by adding anchors and mending the curves - again this saved me having to use the pencil tool over such a large area).

And, no, I didn't draw the background!

DBO aka Dave Bowcutt

Just passing on the exciting information that a friend of mine is designing the crews' salvage vessel as we speak. This may be a bit ambitous, but he hopes to create a 3D model that can be used from all conceivable angles (yes even that one you're thinking of right now).